In like a lion?

I headed up to Oregon City yesterday to look for sea lions.

What’s that, you say? Sea lions live in the sea? That’s how they got their name?

I know, but every spring, sea lions follow the Chinook salmon runs upriver. For years, there’s been all kinds scandals surrounding the issue of sea lions at Bonneville Dam. The dam creates a sort of vertical bottleneck that makes the salmon much easier to get ahold of than they are in the open ocean, and the sea lions are eating them by the hundreds.

To protect the salmon, the Fish & Wildlife Service has tried scaring them away with fireworks and underwater noise bombs. They’ve sent some offending sea lions off to join the marine mammal circus (Sea World), and they’ve killed others.

Like Bonneville Dam, the locks and fish ladder at Oregon City create a barrier that causes migrating salmon to pile up in the Willamette River south of Portland. The Oregon City News ran a pretty thorough piece on the issue last week (http://www.oregoncitynewsonline.com/news/story.php?story_id=126997866815858600).

These sea lion are often portrayed in the news humorously, with reporters using words like “buffet” and “feast” to describe the salmon that sea lions “chomp” and “munch” and “gobble.” One Seattle Times headline reads “Snacking sea lions scarfing up sparse Columbia Chinook run.”

I question whether the jokey tone is appropriate, since this is an issue that drives people apoplectic with rage. Some people are foaming at the mouth that more isn’t being done to stop the sea lions from damaging the fish run. Others are flipping their wigs that the Fish & Wildlife Service is killing innocent mammals. At one point, killing of lions at Bonneville was halted by the Humane Society.

There aren’t currently any plans to kill the sea lions at Willamette Falls, but Fish &

Wildlife is planning to start trying to scare them away. I was hoping I might be able to see or hear them in action, but it didn’t work out that way.

Willamette Falls is one of the biggest waterfalls in American, not in height but in width. In fact, its broad horseshoe shape makes it the seventeenth widest waterfall in the world, according to the World Waterfall Database (http://www.world-waterfalls.com/home.php).

These falls really are an awesome sight. There was a time when men came to this remarkable natural wonder and rubbed their eyes in amazement, unable to believe that there could be such a perfect place to build a paper mill. And so, part of what makes Willamette Falls such an awesome sight today is the rusty, rickety labyrinth of buildings, tanks, steaming chimneys and rushing torrents of wastewater that overlay the natural geography. It’s really impossible to tell where the paper mills end and the falls begin.

A scenic path runs along the east rim of the river gorge, providing epic views — most of it is closed right now, though. I took the second photo on this post from that path last summer. There’s also a bit of scenic pathway running right along the river, attached to the upper path by a scary metal staircase. But all this is on the wrong side of the river to see the locks or the fish ladder.

I poked around on the west side of the river a little, but I didn’t find a good way to get near the water.

My best view was from a turnout along Highway 99 (across the street from a very nice bar called the Highland Still House, FYI). There were at least two other people there looking for sea lions, and a few others that were probably tourists.

It was windy and raining.

A bit further south is another, smaller viewpoint. From there, I saw a sleek little black head in the water. It was near the small blue building in the first photo.

The sea lion was swimming against the current, and quickly went underwater. I saw it a few more times, or else some other sea lions, in the rough grey water below the mills. I started thinking about how long it takes to drive from Portland to Astoria. This sea lion swam farther than that — over 100 miles, against a strong current — to get here.

I’m not going to try to resolve the sea lion issue, but I do think they deserve a little more respect, if not from Fish & Wildlife, then at least from the people who write about them. There’s a hint, in many accounts, that the sea lions are somehow not playing fair. And no one’s talking about what happens out in the ocean, where pollock fishing is killing tens of thousands of salmon every year (http://www.yukonsalmon.com/whatwedo/Fact%20Sheet%20Salmon%20Bycatch%208-08.pdf).